In the days when mainframe computers and super computers dominated the digital landscape, users were typically given slices of computing time from a fixed pool so that the computer worked on many jobs in parallel. Users interfaced with the mainframe computers using “dumb terminals” connected to the mainframe computers and simple command line user interface. However, the computing environment gradually shifted to lower-cost personal computers and workstations, which offered users greater control of how their applications executed and a better, more intuitive graphical user interface. More recently however, with the global connectivity provided by the Internet and faster bandwidths, there has been another shift toward simplified or stripped-down computers or appliances connected with the distributed data storage and computing resources provided by “web farms” via the Internet. Web farms are typically clusters of servers, microcomputers and mainframe computers that currently perform mostly web server and hosting function for web applications and web pages.
In the computer graphics domain, current computer graphical visualization systems may employ a cluster of workstations or personal computers executing a graphics application and working simultaneously on a single job to render an image to be displayed on a display device. The image is displayed as a single logical image on a single monitor screen or across multiple monitor screens. Such visualization systems may use a plurality of graphics pipelines to render different portions of an image for display on the display monitor to speed up processing time and improve the quality of the displayed image.